David Adams's organ recitals are events best approached in a spirit of expecting the unexpected. The early 20th-century German composer Hugo Distler (1908-42), who opened Adams's recital at St Michael's, Dun Laoghaire, on Sunday, is a figure whose work, mostly choral and for organ, scarcely registers in concert life here in Ireland.
Adams's performance of the 1935 Partita on Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme showed Distler as a harmonically conservative composer attracted by a high level of incidental dissonance. The three-movement Partita had an almost giddy exuberance, sometimes with an intriguing, though perhaps not intentional, flavour of the Orient.
The highlight of the selection of Bach - four chorale preludes from the Orgelbuchlein and the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor - was the closing fugue, extraordinary in this performance for its sustained energy and sweep, sounding like something enormously complex, stated with effortless clarity in a single, unstrained breath.
Raymond Deane's Apostille of 1993 was first heard at St Michael's in 1994. It made an altogether stronger impression in its second performance on Sunday, showing a teasing playfulness in the tentative repetitiveness of its opening, and its colliding worlds of chorale and organistic flourish. Donnacha Dennehy's new Mad, Avid, Sad (the title an anagram of David Adams's name) shows some of the composer's typical concerns with processes. In his laid-back spoken introduction to the piece, he variously described these as "virus technique" and "vandalism".
The transformational concerns are not a million miles from Deane's. But the piece, written in return for Adams's playing at the composer's wedding, is much more pithily condensed, functioning as a dazzling, compact organ toccata.
David Adams has a winning way with 19th-century romantic virtuoso music. Liszt's Fantasia and Fugue on BACH may not be the sort of repertoire most suited to the Rieger organ of St Michael's. On Sunday, however, it became a consistently thrilling experience in the hands of one of Ireland's most resourceful musicians.
